Redundancy: Not in fashion these days?

Patrik wrote:I was at a short "demo" of self-rescue techniques the other day, where one employee of a local guide company showed a few "tricks". He was a big fan of the "quad" (fig. 4 in rockandice.com/climbing-new… ), but also said he was perfectly happy with a single sling sliding-X with no knots (fig. 2 in the above link) clipped to two bolts as was one of the attendees. I have seen this used a few times over the last few years as an "anchor", but every time, I'm just wondering how our requirement for redundancy has simply been thrown out the window. Whatever favorite acronym you have for anchor requirements (SRENE is a common one), all of them contain an "R" for Redundancy. I've always thought the definition of redundancy is that: "if one piece fails, we should not die". If the sling itself fails in fig. 2, we die. Therefore, this is not a redundant "anchor". How can a guide publicly go out and say this is fine? How can RockAndIce show such a picture and still label it as an "anchor"?

When leading and I have to build an anchor, I always use three pieces and cord. If there are bolts at belay station, I use sliding x with TWO slings. I've always carried two as backup in case my partner forgot his or whatever and weigh next to nothing. Just recently I started using both of them when I have to build an anchor on bolts (which is almost never). If a rock ever falls on me and cuts both slings that on my anchor, then you'll just read about it somewhere and disregard this comment.